Let me get this out of the way right from the start: Zorpia does not provide a great social networking experience. It is laden with banner ads that are more prominent than its content, cluttered with an over-abundance of features and buttons, and, while purporting to be a site for “finding friends,” it is pretty obviously skewed towards casual hook-ups. Unless, that is, you’re looking for a long term relationship with someone who sees fit to drop her trousers for a photo on her dating profile.

It also has a dreadful spamming problem that it needs to fix fast. After signing up and, within an hour, receiving three unsolicited emails from Zorpia, I realized that it had auto-subscribed me to receive emails for “general notifications”, “dating app notifications”, “friending app notifications”, “recommendation notifications”, “news from friends”, and “Zorpia product updates”. Unacceptable.

All that aside, I still find Zorpia pretty interesting because: 1) It’s a bootstrapped startup that has so far survived for seven years without any external funding and now claims 25 million registered users, and 2) It is one of the few foreign Internet companies to hold an ICP license for operating in China. Actually, as far as I can tell, the Hong Kong-based company is the only foreign social network to hold the license.

I recently got on Skype with Zorpia founder and CEO Jeffrey Ng, a Hongkonger who got his computer science degree at the University of Illinois, and asked him about the process of getting an ICP license. He told me it took years. For a start, he said, Zorpia needed to set up a company in China, and that process took a full year. He established a shell company in Kunming, Yunnan province, to take care of the China operations. It is that company that must apply for the ICP license.

Getting the license then required reading and signing 80-page contracts. Once the process is complete, eight different government departments have to approve the company every year. In any country, bureaucracy can be a huge headache, but China takes it to a whole new level.

“The problem is the information blockage in China,” Ng told me. “Everybody says different things. Even Mainland Chinese find it so difficult to get things done. You get pushed from official to official and it took us months to figure out who to talk with.”

While the site has been in Mainland China since 2008 and has 2.8 million registered users from there, it was not allowed to make money there without the license, Ng said.

Of course, one of the requirements of the license is that the site comply with government censorship, which is a challenge for a social network that is populated with user-generated content. It is the job of Zorpia’s seven-man team to catch any “inappropriate” content posted to the site, but sometimes the prohibited stuff slips through. When that happens, the authorities are often on the phone demanding prompt action, with the threat that the site would be taken down. Ng suggested that the deadline for responding can be as little as half an hour.

But that’s just the cost of doing business in the world’s largest Internet market. “Coming from Hong Kong, knowing how the Western world runs and at the same being able to speak Chinese and growing up in the Chinese environment, I respect how the Chinese government is running the country,” Ng said. “For any business that wants to survive in China, it’s important that you respect and understand their rules.”

Zorpia, which has 2 million unique users per month, is not a profitable company and makes all its money from advertising. About 40 percent of its users come from India, with 10 percent from China. Those are the markets that Ng is focusing on. Zorpia doesn’t yet have a mobile application, and it is seeking funding.

Booker, which helps service businesses better engage with customers online, has raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Medina Capital, with participation from strategic investor First Data, Jump Capital, and Signal Peak Ventures, as well as existing investors. The New York City company now sees 3 million appointments booked monthly across 73 countries in 11 languages on its platform. [via Booker]

PCH, a company which “helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into brands and makes a variety of consumer tech products for major companies such as Apple,” has acquired Fab for a reported $15 million in cash and stock. Fab previously had a $1 billion valuation and raised $325 million. It will “continue to focus on design” at PCH. [Source: Bloomberg]

BlackBerry has unveiled several new smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the touchscreen-focused BlackBerry Leap and a device with a “dual curve slider,” in addition to its keyboard-equipped products. [Source: New York Times]

March 3, 2015

“I hope to have a bigger presence in the tech world. I love coming up with different app ideas, and I have a few more that are coming out. Once you get started and you have this creative bug of ideas that you want to get out, I feel like I’ve partnered with the right team, and now I have the creative outlet to make that happen. I’m happy that people are into it and perceiving it well. I just want to create more apps.”

PayPal is planning to acquire Paydiant, the company behind CurrentC — retailers’ answer to Apple Pay — for a reported $280 million. No word yet on how the companies will mix, nor if Paydiant’s relationship with the industry group behind CurrentC will remain intact. [Source: Re/code]

Microsoft is in talks to acquire Prismatic, a news aggregation service that uses natural language processing to recommend content in which its users might be interested, according to a report from TechCrunch. Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are all said to have expressed similar interest in the company. (Which is surely a sign of actual interest and not at all an attempt by someone at the company to make it seem like a hot commodity — right?) [Source: TechCrunch]

March 2, 2015

“Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”

Samsung has announced Samsung Pay, a competitor to the Apple Pay product included in Apple’s latest iPhones, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The feature will allow new Samsung Galaxy S6 owners who use MasterCard to pay for goods with their phones. It’s not clear when other credit card companies will be supported. [Source: The Guardian]